Rockwood South Hill

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great facility is that it earned a very impressive short-term care grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A. Our short-term care ratings are arguably most critical for patients requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically requires additional skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not only nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who ultimately returned home from this facility. We found that 6.4 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

On the list of its many high-end grades, this nursing home was awarded first-rate long-term care score. In fact, we awarded it a score of A in this category. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. After looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 98.85058 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in that category. Our nursing grade looks at the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of licensure of those nurses and the number of hours spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a policy of moving a patient at least once a day.

Adding to its other impressive category grades, we awarded this facility a B+ for its inspection grade. Our inspection grades are based on items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this category tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.